12 ms·

What I hate is that some people feel entitled to getting one's hard work for free.

by maaaats 12y ago

Dylan16807 12y ago
No, that's not the issue. People object to useful IP rotting in the back of a filing cabinet, unused. It's not about getting it free, it's about being able to get it at all. (Some people may want things for free but that's a different issue.)
- tptacek 12y ago
  That objection is a form of entitlement.
  - scrollaway 12y ago
    No, it's not. Some of us actually believe that the advance of humanity comes from the reuse of its own previous work.
    - tptacek 12y ago
      You're not rebutting my argument; you're merely saying that the "entitlement" isn't in this case negative. You've confounded a positive argument with a normative one. Either way: it clearly is entitlement. Someone writes something, conjuring something new out of thin air. An unrelated person believes they have a moral claim to that thing. QED. I do happen to think this entitlement is negative, if for no other reason than that it prevents people from publishing or even talking about publishing for fear of having to deal with entitled strangers arguing with them about what to do with their work. Whatever "good" that sense of entitlement does is, I think, outweighed by the bad. You obviously disagree.
      - c22 12y ago
        But if one subscribes to scrollaway's hypothesis one must conclude that someone cannot conjure anything new out of thin air, that your work does not exist in a vacuum and that "entitled strangers" are not disconnected aliens, but vested shareholders in your cultural genesis.
      - rudolf0 12y ago
        It is a sense of entitlement, but it's far more reasonable. If you spent years working on a codebase which at least a few people liked enough to use, is it really worth dumping all that code in the trash for all of eternity just because you'd incidentally end up capitulating to some obnoxious people when you open source it?
        nirvdrum 12y ago
        Setting aside the licensing issues, and assuming it's just because I don't feel like dealing with obnoxious people, something still doesn't make sense to me. Prior to announcing the shutdown, no one had access to the source. I've made a lot of it available since then, but not all of it. Today, they still don't have access to that source. How is society any worse off? Unless your belief is simply that all code should be open source. And that's fine, but then it doesn't really seem tied to the shutdown of the company.
        rudolf0 12y ago
        No, I don't think all code should be open source at all. Humanity isn't worse off for it if you don't release the source, but you could potentially make humanity better off by releasing it. If you keep it to yourself forever, never to be used or seen again, you reduce the chance of helping someone's project or improving someone's life to 0%. If you do release it, there's that chance that a few people out there will borrow some of its ideas to help them out, or perhaps they'll actually use the entire codebase so they don't reinvent the wheel. This could save them a lot of time and effort. Or maybe a non-coder will use it because they genuinely want to use the app. And who knows, maybe it'll be a lot more than a few people. It's just a bit existentially sad to essentially lock all that code produced out of so many man hours in a little sphere that is never opened again. For a good example of this, look at Isaac Newton's unreleased works. If you really don't want to appease obnoxious beggars from companies, you can just release it with a license that restricts all, or certain kinds, of commercial use.
        deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
        12y ago
    - pnathan 12y ago
      But, it is! The question is, are we as humanity entitled to previous work after $period_or_event? (I would argue that yes! we are! after... some debatable period or time, and I would argue that not all that can be recovered is worth recovering, but those are strictly subsidiary from the question).
      - tptacek 12y ago
        Just to be clear: at issue here isn't whether some piece of code scraped from an HTTP response or found without a license on Github should revert to the public domain. The specific entitlement we are discussing is whether work you produce on your own in private, without ever revealing it to the public, is so encumbered by the entitlement of strangers that you have a duty to furnish it. That's what people who cajole business owners over open-sourcing their failed projects are asserting.
        pnathan 12y ago
        Absolutely. To be crystal clear, I am discussing whether the technical & intellectual work produced as part of your (as commonly understood by the layperson) property and business, ought (as a duty) to be furnished by the creator/owner under some license to the broader world in some sense (whether by specific request or generalized publishing). I argue that, generally, if said piece of property has no other encumbrance, then after some event or period of time, if this property is not providing value, the creator/owner should yield the property to the broad public, as their duty to society. In particular, I am not asserting that they have a duty to make it useable or useful, or have a duty to do anything besides a tar ball or the moral equivalent. I am not asserting that it is always possible (encumbrances exist...). I am asserting the principle that our duty to society demands yielding this property up to the world at some point when we no longer find it valuable to own in any sense. I am founding my statement of duty based upon reading too many papers from the 50s-70s where really interesting systems were developed, and then redeveloped years later, when the original companies had disappeared or discontinued the initial product. I think we could be much further along if the publishing of source was a commonly done thing.
  - Dylan16807 12y ago
    It's entitlement, but not entitlement to free stuff.
- jarcane 12y ago
  I agree there's something to that. But I've also seen first hand that actually, yes, a whole fuck of a lot of people just want something for nothing and will happily tell you how great your thing is but only when they don't have to pay anything for it. And even once you do go free and open "to save it from the filing cabinet," any option you leave open to contributing to the maintenance of it long term even will be largely ignored. Even Mozilla continues to exist more because of the search engine licensing money than actual contributions to the effort.
- michaelbuckbee 12y ago
  Agreed, but the most useful form of that objection would be to make an offer the codebase, etc.
- brudgers 12y ago
  I think there's a distinction between possibly useful and probably useful. My old business records might be made into useful scratch pads by developmentally challenged individuals undergoing vocational training at the local GoodWill Industries. But where theory meets reality, donating twelve banker's boxes of paper is neither in my interest nor those creating the training program. People who save empty shampoo bottles and mayo jars and used condoms because they might be useful someday are the subject of the reality show 'Hoarders'. Some things are not worth preserving. And discarded code doesn't take up space in a landfill.
- danielweber 12y ago
  In a repeated game (which the world is), otherwise-paying customers can just sit back, wait for the company to fail, and then get the software for free.
  - pnathan 12y ago
    Eh, that depends on if the value is the software, or in the delivered service. Can go either way. I am very confident that , e.g., some Company I once dealt with could open source nearly everything with AGPL3 or other far-out license, and it would make piss-all difference to their bottom line, because they sell satisfaction of customer desire, and getting to that place is a very hard road in their business. Not all companies have that model though.
curun1r 12y ago
The one group that I feel is somewhat entitled to the code is the customer base. Not open sourcing it is one thing, but I'd highly encourage the author to release the code as shared source with only his former customers. They're the ones that tried to help make his startup a success. They're not the freeloaders. If they end up giving the code to someone else, then so be it...he's not making any more money off it anyways. Moreover, I think the shared source model is one that more companies should pursue from the beginning. For one, having light on the code from day 1 helps keep developers honest. Secondly, it establishes a trust relationship with customers that can be very powerful. And lastly, it eliminates one element of fear in the purchasing decision...potential customers don't have to worry about being left in the lurch if the business goes under.
- ygjb 12y ago
  Why? If there weren't enough customers to support the business model with the way he was approaching it, then there isn't enough business to sustain it. If one of his customers is interested in the platform enough that they want access to the code to run it, they should pay him for it - either to hire the talent, or to buy the business. Some projects are created because people are passionate about them, and some are created so that people can keep the lights on. Shared source is an awful model for startups - it results in increased legal wrangling to establish ownership and licensing, it creates entanglements that could prevent or constrain growth, and it explicitly says to the startup "I don't trust you to be here soon, so I want to own part of you." The correct way for a business to eliminate a fear of a partner disappearing is to pay fair value and sign a contract so that the vendor they depend on has a reliable cash flow.
- danielweber 12y ago
  There's an entire industry called "source code escrow" for this problem. If someone is concerned that you'll go out of business, you can escrow your stuff, and they can continue to run it and modify it. You can probably create a proper license so they can use it internally however they want but not sell it/give it away.
- nirvdrum 12y ago
  I feel like I went above and beyond what was needed. I communicated clearly with my customers. I'm running all the servers right now with my own personal money so they had an extra month to get all their data. I found a company that could provide some of the same functionality and got them to offer my customers a discount. I open-sourced a lot of the code. And I didn't bother wasting their time with stuff that wouldn't work without significant effort. The fact I can't easily open-source certainly could be a topic of discussion. But I don't think I was being terribly dishonest by outsourcing large pieces of functionality to software I don't have the rights to distribute. We originally used jQuery UI and it was a constant source of headaches. We switched to ExtJS, got a much richer UI up in a weekend, had paid support for any issues, and our customers were happier with the product. It was a trade-off and I was hedging on making the company work, not making it easier to give away should the company fail.

What I hate is that some people feel entitled to getting one's hard work for free.

by maaaats 12y ago

What I hate is that some people feel entitled to getting one's hard work for free.

No, that's not the issue. People object to useful IP rotting in the back of a filing cabinet, unused. It's not about getting it free, it's about being able to get it at all. (Some people may want things for free but that's a different issue.)

tptacek 12y ago
That objection is a form of entitlement.
- scrollaway 12y ago
  No, it's not. Some of us actually believe that the advance of humanity comes from the reuse of its own previous work.
  - tptacek 12y ago
    You're not rebutting my argument; you're merely saying that the "entitlement" isn't in this case negative. You've confounded a positive argument with a normative one. Either way: it clearly is entitlement. Someone writes something, conjuring something new out of thin air. An unrelated person believes they have a moral claim to that thing. QED. I do happen to think this entitlement is negative, if for no other reason than that it prevents people from publishing or even talking about publishing for fear of having to deal with entitled strangers arguing with them about what to do with their work. Whatever "good" that sense of entitlement does is, I think, outweighed by the bad. You obviously disagree.
    - c22 12y ago
      But if one subscribes to scrollaway's hypothesis one must conclude that someone cannot conjure anything new out of thin air, that your work does not exist in a vacuum and that "entitled strangers" are not disconnected aliens, but vested shareholders in your cultural genesis.
    - rudolf0 12y ago
      It is a sense of entitlement, but it's far more reasonable. If you spent years working on a codebase which at least a few people liked enough to use, is it really worth dumping all that code in the trash for all of eternity just because you'd incidentally end up capitulating to some obnoxious people when you open source it?
      - nirvdrum 12y ago
        Setting aside the licensing issues, and assuming it's just because I don't feel like dealing with obnoxious people, something still doesn't make sense to me. Prior to announcing the shutdown, no one had access to the source. I've made a lot of it available since then, but not all of it. Today, they still don't have access to that source. How is society any worse off? Unless your belief is simply that all code should be open source. And that's fine, but then it doesn't really seem tied to the shutdown of the company.
        rudolf0 12y ago
        No, I don't think all code should be open source at all. Humanity isn't worse off for it if you don't release the source, but you could potentially make humanity better off by releasing it. If you keep it to yourself forever, never to be used or seen again, you reduce the chance of helping someone's project or improving someone's life to 0%. If you do release it, there's that chance that a few people out there will borrow some of its ideas to help them out, or perhaps they'll actually use the entire codebase so they don't reinvent the wheel. This could save them a lot of time and effort. Or maybe a non-coder will use it because they genuinely want to use the app. And who knows, maybe it'll be a lot more than a few people. It's just a bit existentially sad to essentially lock all that code produced out of so many man hours in a little sphere that is never opened again. For a good example of this, look at Isaac Newton's unreleased works. If you really don't want to appease obnoxious beggars from companies, you can just release it with a license that restricts all, or certain kinds, of commercial use.
      - deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
      - 12y ago
  - pnathan 12y ago
    But, it is! The question is, are we as humanity entitled to previous work after $period_or_event? (I would argue that yes! we are! after... some debatable period or time, and I would argue that not all that can be recovered is worth recovering, but those are strictly subsidiary from the question).
    - tptacek 12y ago
      Just to be clear: at issue here isn't whether some piece of code scraped from an HTTP response or found without a license on Github should revert to the public domain. The specific entitlement we are discussing is whether work you produce on your own in private, without ever revealing it to the public, is so encumbered by the entitlement of strangers that you have a duty to furnish it. That's what people who cajole business owners over open-sourcing their failed projects are asserting.
      - pnathan 12y ago
        Absolutely. To be crystal clear, I am discussing whether the technical & intellectual work produced as part of your (as commonly understood by the layperson) property and business, ought (as a duty) to be furnished by the creator/owner under some license to the broader world in some sense (whether by specific request or generalized publishing). I argue that, generally, if said piece of property has no other encumbrance, then after some event or period of time, if this property is not providing value, the creator/owner should yield the property to the broad public, as their duty to society. In particular, I am not asserting that they have a duty to make it useable or useful, or have a duty to do anything besides a tar ball or the moral equivalent. I am not asserting that it is always possible (encumbrances exist...). I am asserting the principle that our duty to society demands yielding this property up to the world at some point when we no longer find it valuable to own in any sense. I am founding my statement of duty based upon reading too many papers from the 50s-70s where really interesting systems were developed, and then redeveloped years later, when the original companies had disappeared or discontinued the initial product. I think we could be much further along if the publishing of source was a commonly done thing.
- Dylan16807 12y ago
  It's entitlement, but not entitlement to free stuff.
jarcane 12y ago
I agree there's something to that. But I've also seen first hand that actually, yes, a whole fuck of a lot of people just want something for nothing and will happily tell you how great your thing is but only when they don't have to pay anything for it. And even once you do go free and open "to save it from the filing cabinet," any option you leave open to contributing to the maintenance of it long term even will be largely ignored. Even Mozilla continues to exist more because of the search engine licensing money than actual contributions to the effort.
michaelbuckbee 12y ago
Agreed, but the most useful form of that objection would be to make an offer the codebase, etc.
brudgers 12y ago
I think there's a distinction between possibly useful and probably useful. My old business records might be made into useful scratch pads by developmentally challenged individuals undergoing vocational training at the local GoodWill Industries. But where theory meets reality, donating twelve banker's boxes of paper is neither in my interest nor those creating the training program. People who save empty shampoo bottles and mayo jars and used condoms because they might be useful someday are the subject of the reality show 'Hoarders'. Some things are not worth preserving. And discarded code doesn't take up space in a landfill.
danielweber 12y ago
In a repeated game (which the world is), otherwise-paying customers can just sit back, wait for the company to fail, and then get the software for free.
- pnathan 12y ago
  Eh, that depends on if the value is the software, or in the delivered service. Can go either way. I am very confident that , e.g., some Company I once dealt with could open source nearly everything with AGPL3 or other far-out license, and it would make piss-all difference to their bottom line, because they sell satisfaction of customer desire, and getting to that place is a very hard road in their business. Not all companies have that model though.

curun1r 12y ago

The one group that I feel is somewhat entitled to the code is the customer base. Not open sourcing it is one thing, but I'd highly encourage the author to release the code as shared source with only his former customers. They're the ones that tried to help make his startup a success. They're not the freeloaders. If they end up giving the code to someone else, then so be it...he's not making any more money off it anyways. Moreover, I think the shared source model is one that more companies should pursue from the beginning. For one, having light on the code from day 1 helps keep developers honest. Secondly, it establishes a trust relationship with customers that can be very powerful. And lastly, it eliminates one element of fear in the purchasing decision...potential customers don't have to worry about being left in the lurch if the business goes under.

ygjb 12y ago
Why? If there weren't enough customers to support the business model with the way he was approaching it, then there isn't enough business to sustain it. If one of his customers is interested in the platform enough that they want access to the code to run it, they should pay him for it - either to hire the talent, or to buy the business. Some projects are created because people are passionate about them, and some are created so that people can keep the lights on. Shared source is an awful model for startups - it results in increased legal wrangling to establish ownership and licensing, it creates entanglements that could prevent or constrain growth, and it explicitly says to the startup "I don't trust you to be here soon, so I want to own part of you." The correct way for a business to eliminate a fear of a partner disappearing is to pay fair value and sign a contract so that the vendor they depend on has a reliable cash flow.
danielweber 12y ago
There's an entire industry called "source code escrow" for this problem. If someone is concerned that you'll go out of business, you can escrow your stuff, and they can continue to run it and modify it. You can probably create a proper license so they can use it internally however they want but not sell it/give it away.
nirvdrum 12y ago
I feel like I went above and beyond what was needed. I communicated clearly with my customers. I'm running all the servers right now with my own personal money so they had an extra month to get all their data. I found a company that could provide some of the same functionality and got them to offer my customers a discount. I open-sourced a lot of the code. And I didn't bother wasting their time with stuff that wouldn't work without significant effort. The fact I can't easily open-source certainly could be a topic of discussion. But I don't think I was being terribly dishonest by outsourcing large pieces of functionality to software I don't have the rights to distribute. We originally used jQuery UI and it was a constant source of headaches. We switched to ExtJS, got a much richer UI up in a weekend, had paid support for any issues, and our customers were happier with the product. It was a trade-off and I was hedging on making the company work, not making it easier to give away should the company fail.